Books: True Tales from the Mad, Mad, Mad World of Opera

Lotfi Mansouri

Love it or hate it, the operatic world is a treasure trove of fascinating behind- the-scenes shenanigans that rival the dramatic onstage stories of the art form itself. Given that major operas can involve casts of hundreds, huge sets, complex lighting, ambitious staging and the occasional inflated ego, it’s almost inevitable that things will go wrong. And they do.

Lotfi Mansouri has had a front-row seat on the action during his 40-plus years as an opera director. Familiar to Canadian audiences as the director general of the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto (from 1976 to 1988), he has enjoyed a career that has taken him to Europe and the United States and he has worked with the best-known and most beloved singers of his generation.

Written in a friendly, conversational style, with deft, self-deprecating humour, True Tales from the Mad, Mad, Mad World of Opera offers delightfully candid accounts of productions and performances that just didn’t work out as planned. A modest puff of smoke produced for a stage effect instead becomes a major smokescreen that sends an entire production into a tailspin, leading ladies march out of rehearsals in a huff, leading men refuse to follow the most obvious stage directions, a privately-funded production is cancelled at the last minute because of a “schedule change.”

Although Mansouri clarifies that “certain names have been changed to protect the guilty,” there are plenty of other names in the book that have been left intact.

Readers who follow the opera scene will relish these stories about performers they may have heard. And readers for whom opera is foreign territory can nevertheless enjoy these anecdotes, which stand up in their own right as amusing tales, well told.